On Monday, the Georgia Supreme Court held that the Atlanta Independent School System (“APS”) and the Atlanta Board of Education could not withhold $38.6 million from charter schools to pay APS’s pre-existing unfunded pension liability. Under Georgia law, local charter schools are entitled to a proportional share of its school system’s local revenue. Last year, the APS decided deduct money from local revenue for charter start-up schools to help cover a $550 million unfunded pension liability for APS employees that has been accruing since the 1980s. Charter schools sued to force APS to distribute the money without any deduction for APS’s pension liability, arguing that they should not have to pay for debts that they had not incurred. The Georgia Supreme Court agreed with the charter schools’ position that the statutory funding formula in Georgia’s Charter Schools Act did not authorize the APS to subtract the $38.6 million from its calculation of local revenue. The Supreme Court determined that because the statute established a separate and distinct local revenue funding formula for start-up charter schools, the General Assembly intended to fund local schools unequally with regard to local revenue. Read the opinion in Atlanta Independent School System, et al. v. Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School, Inc., et al. here.